


A Hole in a Stained Glass Window

by rageprufrock



Series: Gratuity Included [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 02:54:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8311117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: When winter puts down roots in New York and all the super villains go into hibernation, Bucky's completely unsurprised Stephanie starts getting ideas. 
(A completely self-indulgent, deeply nasty sort-of-sequel to the completely gratuitous Feast, where everybody emerges through the other side of the MCU relatively unscathed, Bucky runs a bar around the corner from Clint's apartment and Stephanie thinks it's time he knocks her up.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone curious about this story's relationship with Reconstruction, it's safe to say you can read this as the happy ending I anticipate for them.

Since they were kids, Bucky's been trying to make the case that Stephanie's nowhere near as goody two-shoes as she looks on the surface, but since they were kids, nobody's believed him. It's not Steph's fault, either; she'd be the first to admit she's hot headed and given to any number of fatal flaws, but there's just something about her blue eyes and that way she smiles — shy, like she's surprised she's smiling every time — that makes the claim completely unbelievable. Bucky'd given up by the time they were 16 — just in time for everybody and their angry fucking priest to warn him against bullying her into "intimacies." Yeah. Okay. Like Bucky has ever effectively bullied Steph into anything.

So of course when winter puts down roots in New York and all the super villains go into hibernation, he's completely unsurprised she starts getting ideas. 

It starts on a Tuesday, after Stephanie's morning studio art class in NYU. Bucky likes to meet her outside the building, because otherwise skinny creeps in women's jeans have a tendency to trap his wife into conversations about gallery shows. It's not that Steph's unaware of her effect on, well, humans, basically, but she usually just assumes they're being friendly. Bucky's attempts to impress upon her that they're not being friendly have been unwelcome, and as they've been married for literally seven decades and he's won exactly three fights that entire time, he just goes to meet her outside the building to avoid the hassle.

That Tuesday, there's no skinny creeps in women's jeans, but there's a mob of ladies pushing strollers and a flood of toddlers on leashes. Next to the internet, that it's okay to leash your kids is pretty high on the list of reasons the future is excellent, and he tells Steph as much.

She raises an eyebrow at him, speculative.

Bucky tenses. He knows that fucking look. "What?" he asks.

"You'd leash a kid?" she asks, too casual. 

He narrows his eyes at her. 

"What about our kid?" Steph goes on.

"We don't have a kid," Bucky reminds her, feeling all the hairs on the back of his neck prickling up. 

"What if we did?" she pushes, and slips her arm in his, pressing herself close because God damn it she knows what that fucking does to him. And then because she's clearly getting ready to go in for the kill, she presses her temple to his shoulder and looks up at him through the ash-dark brush of her lashes, her mouth just parted.

Bucky scowls down at her, but he knows that shit doesn't work. "Stephanie," he says. It's a universe in one word; it always has been for him.

She just grins up at him. "I went to the doctor you know," she tells him. "They checked me out."

"Do I gotta punch anybody?" he asks, trying to change direction fast, because Jesus.

"Don't try to distract me with how seductive it all was, me dolled up in a paper dress with my feet up in metal stirrups," she says, and pokes him in the side before asking, "Well? What do you think?"

In a universe where Bucky hasn't been practicing the exact wrong thing to say to her since they were five, he'd probably just confess and say, "Aw, hell, Steph. I'm scared shitless about this — I remember the bleeding, and I had to hold you through it. I never want to do that again." But because this is not that universe, Bucky says:

"I think according to the future, we're too young to get bogged down with a God damn baby."

Later that night, when Clint's making Bucky watch something called fucking Dog Cops, Clint asks, "So how'd you get kicked out this time?" and Bucky says, "I still owe you a head injury from that time you peeped on us, you fucking pervert." This would probably be a more effective threat if Bucky didn't end up spending the next three nights sleeping on Clint's shit sad couch, punching the cushions and missing his mattress. 

* * *

They fight about it a lot because technically, Bucky doesn't need to tell Steph why he doesn't want to have a fucking baby because she was there, too. She'd flipped the mattress and thrown out the sheets and she'd never asked Bucky what he'd done with all the baby toys the neighbors gave them or the blankets she'd half knitted, the baby clothes. Steph's a foot taller and she breathes easy, but in her broader chest is the same heart and Bucky remembers drawing her in close to him, clutching at her, because she'd been sick before but now their bedroom smelled like loss. He knew from her nursing textbooks the baby had been too little to have much in the way of a face, but it'd had a little spine and a head and a heart, the tiny beginnings of lungs. He'd had nightmares — off and on — on the front during the fucking war that started off with him dying in Europe and ended with watching Steph trying to save their tiny baby and its tiny lungs from drowning. It's not like they ever fucking talked about it; it was World War II and there were a lot of people dying.

"It's different now," Steph pleads with him. 

She makes him listen to some radio show about a baby that had been born at 23 weeks and six days and survived like that is somehow going to do anything other than give Bucky fucking nightmares about their baby coming out at 23 weeks and five days and dying in a plastic box. 

Bucky's no good at being more stubborn than Steph, but he actually thinks he might be winning this round until Norma, who lives downstairs, runs into the bar and gives him her baby.

"What's happening," he says to her, and juggles Nathan until the little shit's comfortable on Bucky's metal arm. Nathan is the chubbiest fucking toddler Bucky's ever seen, and right now he's staring up at Bucky with three fingers tucked into his mouth, drooling like a bulldog with copper penny eyes.

Norma zips up her down coat and looks angry at the world. "Jane bit somebody during recess, that's what's happening," she swears. "I'm really sorry, Bucky — would you be able to watch Nathan for a little while? I gotta go get her before she tries to eat anybody else in third grade."

Bucky looks down at Nathan, who's grinning up at him now, gummy and gap-toothed. "We think that's fine, and that whatever kid Jane bit probably had it coming, right?"

Nathan, who's smart as a tack but quiet, just grins and nods.

Norma points at him, warning. "Don't you start, Bucky," she says, and leans over to kiss her baby, and then press a kiss to Bucky's cheek, too, saying, "You're a lifesaver," before dashing out into the blustery cold. 

It's snowing pretty steadily outside, so there're no early lunchtime visitors, and Bucky makes sure Carl and Ivan are set up with their coffees and sandwiches and spends most of his time at the bar reading Nathan a Raymond Chandler book. 

"It was a blonde," Bucky tells Nathan, who claps. Yay blondes. "A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." 

He puts down the book and stares at Nathan seriously.

"I know that just sounds like a saying, but those blondes exist," he warns the kid. Somebody's got to warn the kid about bishop-kicking blondes. "And they will mess you up, Nathan."

And that's when he feels Stephanie's hand sliding around his waist, smells her hair and her skin and feels her warm and soft up against him, hears the grin in her voice as she says, "Don't you listen to him, Nathan Paget — you'd be so lucky to get a bishop-kicker."

Later, after Norma stomps back with Jane — mulish, unrepentant — to fetch Nathan, Steph corners him in the kitchen walk-in and plants one of the filthiest kisses Bucky's ever had the fortune of experiencing on him. He's gasping and trying to figure out if he can find a strategic location to stage a penetrative operation back here that's not going to win him a fucking health code violation when she sticks a hand down his pants and jerks him off like they're back in the 1930s and she's only got five minutes before it's her turn at confession.

"Holy fuck," he wheezes.

"James Buchanan Barnes," she says to him, husky and so fucking pleased with herself he'd be shit scared if he hadn't just messed his pants like a teenager. "I see right through you — here I thought you maybe you'd changed your mind about wanting kids."

"I don't," he lies. "I hate them. I would especially hate having kids with you."

She just smirks at him and goes in for another kiss. His dick gives a valiant twitch, and when she pulls away, she just whispers against his mouth, "Tonight, I'm going to ride you into the mattress and milk you dry."

Bucky makes a creaking noise, and she presses a kiss — almost chaste — to his cheek.

"Don't be late," she tells him, cheerful, smooths back her hair, and exits the back door.

* * *

Seven hours later, Steph's got him pinned to the bed with her thighs, perched over his hips with her back to him, the line of her body fucking poetry. She's braced with her hands fisted in the sheets, rolling her hips back into him, over him, and Bucky is breathless and wordless, staring at the wild tangle of her hair and the fucking jiggle of her ass, flushed, and the place where he disappears into her, slicked and red and stretched tight around him. 

"Steph — Stephanie," Bucky hears himself say, hears himself gasping it.

She tosses her head back, so that she's arched like a bridge or a moon, brings her hands up, and Bucky would beg to see what she's doing, if she's touching her own tits, except he can feel her fingers down where he's fucking into her, the pad of her thumb rubbing the base of his cock — stroking her own slick back up to her clit and Jesus fucking Christ, he's going to die here. 

"You feel…amazing," she says, just shifting her weight back and forth, and the only friction Bucky gets is the tiny shift of her thighs, the scratch of their sheets. He's run through with desperation, reaches down to grip her by her hips and drag her into him, rocks his hips up, greedy, fuck knows what he's swearing at her at this point, watching the glinting metal of his hand bruise her skin and wishing the mark would stay past morning — that she'd walk around with his handprints on her and everybody would know they wouldn't ever get to touch and shouldn't even look. 

"Please," he begs her, because he's gotta come. He has no idea how long they've been coupled together like this, bodies locked, but his thighs are soaked and her thighs are soaked and he could cry from how much he needs to come and — 

And then she looks over her shoulder down at him, her face a red and her mouth red and her eyes electric blue, and she says to him, in the rasp of her voice left over from the night:

"Shove me down then — fill me up."

The way he moves is less Bucky and more the soldier the Red Room made him, and he comes up and closes his flesh and bone hand on the back of Steph's neck. He shoves her forward until he hears her drop to her elbows, her hair hanging down around her face, and he curls up over her back, keeps her knees spread with his own, pressed against the inside of her legs, so she's all the way open for him, the red gash of her cunt gaped around him, her ass tucked in the cradle of his hips. 

He keeps that hand on her neck as he puts the metal one down on the bed for leverage, and he leans in close to her, so he can scrape his teeth over the curve of her neck in a warning and whisper, "I'm gonna make a fucking mess of you," shove into her the way he wouldn't have dared, long ago.

Bucky's rough with her, and the harder he fucks her the better the noises she makes: fragile, breathy, soft and half-swallowed moaning noises, and Bucky can see her fingers clawing at the bed, feel her gushing wet around him. He thinks about coming into the silk hot clutch of her, until she's dripping with him or her gut's swelled up with his kid and it hits him like a punch in the solar plexus, how much he wants it and hasn't let himself want it in decades. 

It makes him gasp into her ear, hiss it hearing his balls slap heavy up against her cunt and the slick sound of cock in her, "I tried not to think about it, you know, knocking you up." 

"Oh, fuck, Bucky, Buck," she pleads with him. He could get her off right now, have her light up like a firecracker if he'd touch her anywhere near her clit.

"It was so fucking selfish," he just goes on, keeps slamming into her, hard enough the room's silent except for how she's making crying noises now, gasping for air, and the sound of his hips slapping into her ass. He's gonna hurt tomorrow; she's gotta be hurting now. "But fuck, when I was in Italy, Steph, hell if it wasn't all I could think about."

One of her hands finds his metal one, closes her palm over it, and Bucky doesn't bother with a pang of loss that he can't really feel her, that it's just pressure and not the sweat of her skin or the cut of her nails. He tells her:

"I used to lie there in the fucking mud and stare up and think about you, about that shitty bed we had with the springs that creaked so bad — " he sees her trying to reach her other hand down, down between her legs, and so he grabs it with his metal one and then closes those fingers around both her wrists, pins them down on the bed and listens to her sob " — and think about what it would have been like to keep you there — just like this: head down, ass up."

He raises up on his knees a little, enough to tilt her, to change the angle, so that on every stroke in his cock's dragging against the back of her clit now in that way that almost hurts it's so intense, and Steph jerks underneath him, lets out a shriek as he does it once, twice, and then does it more and more but faster.

"I thought about how I'd maybe tie you up there, so you couldn't work so hard, so those guys at the dock would stop staring at you — and then the only way you'd wear yourself out was on — my — dick," he tells her, punctuating every last word with a thrust against her. "And you'd be such a good girl, Steph,I'd be so good to you — come in you, keep you filled up all the time."

She groans, and it's a deep noise that comes out of her chest, rolls up from her belly. She says, "Yeah, you'd fuck it into me where it belongs."

Bucky has to bite his lip hard enough draw blood at that — his woman has a fucking mouth on her. 

He manages to say, "Yeah. Yeah, I make sure you got every drop, sweetheart, wouldn't waste it."

She shakes her head, blond hair shifting, and she ends up with her cheek pressed against the bed, her face turned to the side, and Bucky watches the open wound of mouth searching for breath, the way her lips move as she says, "No, Buck — I'd never waste it." 

"And we'd keep it up, wouldn't we?" Bucky asks her, and puts his face in the back of her neck, so that he can throw his whole body into her, wishes he could crawl inside of her. "We'd keep at it until you caught, wouldn't we."

He hears her begging, her voice wet and her body shaking under his. She's babbling at him, "Fuck — yeah, Bucky, please. Come in me — fill me up, fill me up, please, please," and Bucky lets go of her neck so he can scrub two fingers down over her clit as he promises her, "I will, sweetheart, you can have it, all of it, take it, fucking take it."

She comes like an electric shock: her whole body roiling like the sea underneath him, breaking like a wave, and Steph shouts and shouts and she closes down on Bucky like a vice, and he fucks her through it, until he thinks about the fucked-out ruin of her and the wet of his come welled up in her pussy and comes like a fucking freight train. He pushes in as deep as he can go, shoves at her until she's trembling and on her belly on the bed, whimpering, tucks himself in deep in her cunt and feels himself jerk empty — rubs it into her desperately, wants every drop of him inside her.

It takes ages to come down, until their breathing slows, and Bucky doesn't want to roll off her back, to pull out. He wants to keep rolling his hips into her slowly. He wants to get hard inside her again and keep going. He wants to keep her full all the time, so that she's always dripping with him. 

Steph just hums underneath him, rolls her ass back to meet him, and in the hoarse remnants of her voice, she whispers, "Don't pull out, Buck," and "You oughta keep me here, right under you," and Bucky has to swear and put a hand over her mouth so she'll stop talking, so he can use his other one to rub at her until she comes around him again, and he starts to feels himself getting hard all over in the hot snatch of her, as he's rocking into her.

* * *

The stains are bad enough that the next day, Steph spends half the morning cutting up the sheets into scrap cloth and makes Bucky walk the rest of it down to the incinerator in the basement. They spend the rest of the day fucked out and lazy, ordering Indian, and Bucky makes Steph watch _Flowers in the Attic_ because she's vulnerable and too cuddly to run away.

"Just because they were locked in the attic together doesn't mean they get that desperate," she complains, but she does it from Bucky's lap on the couch so he doesn't mind that much.

He rubs a thumb against her skin, where he's tucked his hand up underneath her sweater against her belly. There's no way to know — hell, maybe they'll just have to keep trying — but he's already thinkingabout it — watching her round out like a waxing moon. 

"She's got needs, Steph," he tells her solemnly. "You ought know about those."

As punishment, she makes them go to the hellscape of Target at Atlantic Avenue for linens. The store is too crowded and always looks half-gutted, and Steph walks up and down almost every aisle, staring and staring at the endless plenty of everything these days. She buys soap and some bath towels in a soft green and she gets a new pair of slippers and she goes dreamy in the baby aisle, staring down it with the hungry look she used to get about art supplies and flowers.

And it's all Bucky can do not to get scared again, to just stand tucked up where it's safe behind her, wrap an arm low around her belly.

Steph's always known his mind, though, so she laces their fingers together, brings his hand to her mouth and kisses him soft over the knuckles — tender.

"It'll be fine, Buck," she whisper to him, leans back against him. "You'll see."

* * *

By unspoken mutual agreement, after they decide to do this, they don't talk about it.

Before, before the war and before their individual and separate big sleeps, they'd always used condoms, but these days there are a 101 ways for gals. Steph used to get a shot every three months, when she was SHIELD active, but as part of the Avengers she'd dropped them because they gave her headaches and made her tits hurt; then she'd started keeping a ring in their fridge. Being a woman was confusing as fuck. But anyway, the point is, Steph's never had a problem bossing him around in or out of bed — if she changed her mind she wasn't going to be shy about throwing condoms at his head.

And Bucky'd grown up in a house full of women, so he's no stranger to girls' stations before the cross. And then there's Steph, whose pussy is very important to him for a variety of reasons. Before, long ago, her periods had been inconsistent and shitty, sometimes skipping entire seasons. The serum had turned her clockwork, and since it's Bucky's job to do the grocery shopping and Steph's job to fly around the world fighting monsters and aliens and sometimes alien monsters, it's Bucky who notices it, first.

The new box of pads goes unopened in the bathroom, and on what should be day three of Steph's cycle Bucky stares at it and has a quiet meltdown for half an hour while she's outta town before he goes and opens up the bar. 

Carl and Ivan take one look at his face and hustle him into a bar stool. 

"What's this," Ivan asks him, waving at his expression. 

"This is — you've got a look," Carl picks up, right where Ivan left off.

"Did that wife of yours leave you for Tony Stark?" Ivan asks. Ivan's first wife left him for a home shopping network millionaire so any time Bucky's in any kind of mood this is his de facto question.

"No," Bucky says, but he sounds utterly wrecked.

"Jesus — is she — she's okay right?" Carl tries. "Nothing was on the news."

Carl and Ivan watch the news for Steph — for Lady Liberty — religiously. Bucky's not really sure if they're his regulars because they like the bar or if they just wanna be here in case Steph rolls in. 

"She's fine," Bucky wheezes.

Carl and Ivan trade looks. "Convincing," Carl tells him, scowling. "Hell, kid, what's — ?"

Bucky puts his head down on the bar and tells it, "I think she's pregnant. Oh my God."

Ivan goes behind the bar and starts making Bucky a drink. 

It's a slow day, and the night manager tags Bucky out at 6 p.m., so Bucky's got nothing better to do than take the long way home and hang around the Personal Hygiene aisle at their Duane Reade like a fucking creep, staring at the pregnancy tests. About 100 women buying tampons and maxi pads give him indulgent smiles.  

"Fuck it," Bucky says to himself, and grabs one of every brand they sell.

It's another 12 hours until Steph gets home safe and sound, and Bucky meets her at the door clutching the Clear Blue Easy box. He'd been planning on being casual about it but fuck that.

Stephanie frowns at him for a half a beat before she realizes and whispers, " _Oh_." 

"Yeah," Bucky agrees, and hands her the box. "Get peeing."

Steph runs out of pee at the fifth test and calls him a lunatic before refusing to do the rest of them, which leaves them sitting on the floor outside the bathroom with its row of life-altering sticks, staring at the clock.

"It doesn't always take so easy," Stephanie says, mostly to herself. 

Bucky just nods and keeps chewing on his metal fingers; their dentist is going to give him hell and another bite guard at this rate.

"Like — last time, it was an accident," she goes on, stumbling a little over the memory. "You can't really predict this kind of thing."

He loops his arm over her shoulder, dragging her in close so he can put a kiss on her temple, mouth over the wispy blond hair above her ear. Sometimes Bucky's still scared by the way he feels a sudden, disorienting wave of longing for her, though she's closer at hand than maybe she's ever been. There's no war or ocean separating them, no code and trigger words. They live in peacetime, and her heart beat is strong and even in her chest, and Bucky's selfishly happy he'll never have to call the priest for her, that she'll outlive him, and what a fucking gift he has, to never again have to know a world where she isn't.

"We can try again," she whispers. 

Bucky watches her fingers go white knuckled, twisted around each other in her lap, and he can't have that, so he pulls her hand up and presses a kiss across her knuckles: they're bruised from the last fight she was in and her nails are ragged. Bucky feels the heat of her, the bones through her thin skin, and he thinks he's already so lucky it'd be pure greed, too much, to get anything else. 

"Of course," he says, to her ring finger, over her mother's wedding ring and her grandmother's wedding ring, brought over from Ireland in a secret pocket stitched into her dress. It's got a scar, just like he and Steph do, from the war, and he can think of no more fitting witness for all the days of their lives. "It's you and me, babe — to the end of the line."

Steph cracks a smile, finally, and it's watery and worried but real. "Sweet talker."

He nudges her shoulder, teasing, whispers back, "For my sweet girl," and she's laughing at him now, kissing it into his mouth, when the timer goes off on the counter.

* * *

Time was, a couple got happy news and they told the family once you couldn't hide it any longer and bought some clothes and furniture, impatient and jittery. First time around, they hadn't done any of that happily, too scared to be hopeful. He'd gotten a toy or two, here and there, and hidden it away, and Steph had made some things and tucked them into the bottom of her sewing basket. Bucky tries not to think about that, since it all lives in a museum case now, like the dissection of their past tragedy belongs to the Smithsonian.

Now, everything's so complicated: doctors and prenatal visits and classes. Stephanie says yes to the doctor but no to everything else; Bucky just says yes to Stephanie. Given the givens, SHIELD medical is pretty much the only facility equipped to handle Stephanie outside of the private clinic Stark runs out of his building, and Stephanie puts the nix on that immediately. 

"They're gonna notice eventually," Bucky tells her, because he doesn't trust Stark but he trusts SHIELD even less. 

"I want a few months, just for us," she says. "And — in case."

He doesn't say anything else, just reads a copy of _Guns & Ammo_ in the waiting room until the nurses call them in.

Bucky remembers everything from the visit, recording everything the nurse and the doctor say like it's a mission briefing of critical importance. But the thing that actually makes a mark, that leaves him feeling weak-kneed and new and younger than he's felt since he was actually young is the blurry black and white picture of this thing he and Steph have made, moving a little, on the monitor, its heartbeat a butterfly-wing beat filling up the room.

Bucky finds the doctor outside the exam room later, while Steph's getting dressed again and composing herself. His girl's not a cryer and neither is he, but their eyes are both red; they feel a little shaky.

"Is — I mean, you said the — that it looks okay," Bucky starts. He doesn't even know how to fucking ask this.

But the doctor just looks soft-eyed. "At the moment, everything looks just fine, Sergeant Barnes." 

"We lost one, before," he blurts out. 

"That was then — this is now," Dr. Ruiz says kindly. "She's in perfect health, and I'll be with you every step of the way."

She presses a couple of papers in his hands, and Bucky has to look down before he realizes they're glossy pictures, black and white, of their blob with its little heartbeat. 

"Go on," Dr. Ruiz tells him. "She's probably waiting for you back in the room."

Steph's just buttoning up her shirt, still barefoot when Bucky lets himself back in, too quiet and solemn, her heart in her eyes. 

"Hey," he says to her, and makes her sit down on the exam table again.

"Bucky, what — " she starts, and goes mute when he hands her the photos.

He lets her look her fill, still wondering, and goes down on a knee to get her shoes on, and he tells her toes, the beautiful curve of her ankles, "It's gonna be fine, Steph, you'll see," as he's lacing up the trainers. 

She reaches a hand down, so she can slide her fingers through his hair.

"Okay, Buck," she says, and after a beat, adds, "You know this means you have to work with Tony, right?"

Bucky presses his face into Stephanie's knee and says, " _Fuck_."

* * *

It's the end of February before they get an alert to assemble via Jarvis, and Stephanie straps her shield onto Bucky's back and kisses him tenderly, deeply, all dizzying softness, before he dashes off for his motorcycle, and the mechanized monsters attacking Chelsea Piers.

Bucky's separating a robot monster head from its body with the edge of the shield, not too long later, when Stark says over the open comm line: 

"What the fuck — did we lose Baked Alaska?"

"She's sitting this one out back at home," Bucky says, and finally severs the last network connection and watches the bot power all the way down. "Looks like all you need to do for a shutdown is to decapitate them."

From a distance, there's Black Widow's delighted whoop, and Hawkeye yells something that sounds like "Boomerang arrows!" Bucky doesn't want to know. 

The city's defrosting by degrees, and the weirdos and psychopaths seem to take this as an indication to gear up again. After the Chelsea Piers monsters it's only four days before someone else takes a walk on the strange side, and Steph's StarkPhone jangles with an Assemble alert.

It's early — barely 7 a.m. — and in the winter the city is cloaked in a deep fog that's drifted low so all of Brooklyn is wrapped up in clouds. Their bedroom window is cracked open for a breeze against the aggressive steam heat of their building, and right now they're lying in bed together, huddled close underneath two comforters. Bucky's pressed along her back, a hand low and careful on her belly, though she's barely showing yet, and Steph holds up the phone over her shoulder so he can read the screen, which shouts: FUCKING REED RICHARDS. USO HOT TO TROT REPORT IN AT UN HQ.

"At some point I'm going to punch that guy until all his stupid names for you fall out," Bucky tells the back of Stephanie's neck, and then he puts a kiss there so nothing related to any Starks leave a mark on her. If possible, Bucky hates Stark Jr. more than he hated Senior, which is saying something because if Stephanie hadn't been given to overreaction that asshole totally would have moved in on her in her grieving process like an invasive species.

Steph just laughs, turning in his arms so she can smile up at him, cheeks apple-pink. "I think they're cute."

"Then I'm definitely punching him until all those stupid names fall out," Bucky decides.

She just laughs some more, and presses a closed-mouth kiss to him, and then another. "You better go," she murmurs softly, into his cheek, even as she's looping an arm around his waist to keep him close. "If he has to holler three times he usually just shows up at the house to pluck you off the fire escape."

The annoying Reed Richards situation is just that: annoying. Overall, it takes Bucky, Stark, and Barton — who has an actual fucking slap mark on his face like he's a cartoon character — less than an hour to round up the latest escapees from his lab, threaten him with death, and stagger off to celebrate it being 5 p.m. somewhere in the world. Bucky's halfway a G&T when his phone buzzes.

_Can you bring home a lot of bread and butter pickles and some more tissues? I am hungry and watching this documentary on the National Spelling Bee is making me cry,_ Stephanie has texted him. 

Bucky tosses back his drink and gets moving. "Gotta go — the ball and chain's asking for stuff."

"Where the hell is she, anyway?" Stark asks, way too interested. "She too good for Avengering now?"

"Yeah, that's exactly it," Bucky says, because there's no point in getting into it with Stark. 

Everybody's in everybody's business these days about absofuckinglutely everything, but this is a private thing. He's not just scared shitless the way he was before the war — knees knocking at the thought of losing her and the baby — now he knows how dragons feel: sitting jealously on their mountains of gold. Soon he'll have to share Steph with their kid, and eventually they'll both have to share their kid with the rest of the world, but right now, he likes this secret, tucked close to his chest.

Barton just waves and mumbles, "Tell Steph I said 'hi,'" but Stark points at Bucky and says, eyes narrowing, "I'm going to figure it out, Barnes — you just watch and see."

* * *

Fittingly, because Barton lives upstairs and makes shitty choices, he is the first person who finds out.

Specifically, he finds out because Bucky's out with Natasha and Bruce and Thor for a thing involving a bilgesnipe (what the fuck) terrorizing some shitty town in Arizona, and Stephanie stupidly seems to think Barton can fix things that are wrong with their apartment.

"So let me get this straight," Bucky asks her, later that night when they're sitting on the couch picking over chicken parm from the 24 hour diner down the street. "You thought you'd ask Barton to fix the hot water?"

"Well, he does own the building," Stephanie says, which would sound almost reasonable if you didn't know anything about Clint Barton. She goes on, "Anyway, be nice to him — he looked really shellshocked and asked me four times if maybe I was just getting fat."

Bucky covers his face with his metal hand. "What the fuck is wrong with that guy."

Because Bucky is a jerk just like Steph's always said, the next day when Tony starts in on his, "Where the fuck is Stephanie Barnes," routine like he has been for months, Bucky makes sure to stare at Barton as hard as possible. The guy turns like seven different colors. It's fucking great.

Later, safely back behind the bar with Stephanie perched on a barstool frowning at him over her sketchpad, she says, "You're a piece of work, James Buchanan Barnes."

"It was hilarious," he says to her, and gives her another bowl of green peas, because that's her thing recently. It's less worrying than her earlier anchovy phase, anyway. "You're just pissed you didn't get to see it."

She pours a bunch of ketchup and mustard on top of the peas and keeps trying to glower. 

The fun part of having an unclear identity is where paparazzi follow the rest of the Avengers around, the whole idea of Lady Liberty and Bucky Barnes having been revived from the dead is still sort of nebulous. Especially since on the books, Stephanie is Stephanie Grace Barnes and Bucky is James Barnes, and they might share a passing resemblance with their larger-than-life histories, but it's not like Steph walks around Brooklyn in skintight short-shorts with a knife through a red, white, and star-spangled garter up high on her thigh. (Bucky's not that lucky.) So their lives are largely anonymous. To their neck of the woods, Steph's just another pretty lady with a bun in the oven, and everybody treats her that way: they ask her when she's due and if they know if it's a boy or a girl ("We want to be surprised," she tells them all) and give her tips on where to buy the cutest maternity dresses.

"It feels kind of wasteful to spend this much money on something I'll only wear for a few months," she'd said, running her fingers over a sundress made out of white eyelet cotton and Bucky gets all confused thinking about the soft swell of her tits and her bigger and bigger belly in it and mumbles:

"Well I mean, might be a good investment for more in the future."

Later that night, a nice lady from their bank's fraud department calls them.

"Hi Mr. Barnes, I just wanted to verify that you and your wife actually did make the purchases we recorded today? Um, $900 at Pea in the Pod?" she asks.

He puts his head on the table and hears the shopping bags crinkle. "Yes," he tells the table surface and this poor girl on the phone.

"Oh," the girl says. "Well, we just wanted to check — and congratulations!"

"Thank you," he tells her, and once he hangs up, he just bangs his head against the table some more.

That said, while the paps don't seem to know how to find them, everybody in the world has a camera in their pockets now, so it's inevitable that one of the hipsters in their neighborhood catches a video of Stephanie saying hi to someone's corgi and posts it onto Vine with the caption, "Lady Liberty found modern refined sugars."

"Don't worry," Stark assures Bucky the next day, "I'm not going to make a fat joke about your old lady — that's in the kind of poor taste that having more than one generation of money prevents. I'll just ask her next time I see her if she's leveraging this to get seats on the subway when people offer because they think she's preggo."

Clint, being possibly the worst secret agent in history, immediately goes wide-eyed and says to Bucky:

"I didn't say anything!"

"Fuck me," Stark says, his face turning demonic with glee. "Are you serious?"

The fall out is, predictably, tremendous. Clint sends Lucky down to their apartment with a clutch of bodega carnations in his mouth and a card that says, "Sorry and congrats on the shorty," because of course he does. Stephanie, who loves pathetic animals, gives Lucky a long kiss on his sweet forehead and coos over the flowers because there are no animals more pathetic than Clint Barton. Natasha sends them a set of throwing knives. Stephanie writes a thank you note and then puts them away — delicately — in the gun safe. Pepper sends a bouquet and a baby concierge, which makes Stephanie so uncomfortable Bucky has to make up something about this wife being from a weird religious cult to make the guy go away. What the fuck. Baby concierge. Bruce comes over and baby proofs their house, which he says he's expert at since he has to Hulk proof shit all the time. Thor gives them something terrifying and redolent with magic to celebrate their conception, which Stephanie puts alongside the knives in the gun safe.

"Great, now our guns and those knives will turn magic," Bucky says to her later that night.

Jane and Darcy send a collection of onesies themed for all the Avengers, and Stephanie finds the tiny shield-shaped pillow delightful. They are — along with the baby proofing — so far the only things that get kept for the baby, which is zero percent surprising since weirdly Bruce, Jane, and Darcy are the only normal people Bucky and Steph ever get to interact with.

Tony, because he's the worst human being on the fucking planet, builds them a robot.

It's a horrible fucking nuisance that looks a little bit like a penguin with its domed shape. It has DUM-E's arms, though, and doesn't say words, just makes soft chirruping and booping noises. It sends text messages to Stephanie's phone with pictures of things and the temperature and updates, and when Bucky tries to accidentally destroy it by throwing it off the fire escape, it attaches itself parkour-style to the side of the building and crawls back up. When you shoot it — which he and Clint had done in the basement they're adults here — it throws up a bulletproof shield, big enough to defend itself and probably a baby. It also makes horrible upset noises of distress, and calls the NYPD, Interpol, SHIELD, Stephanie, Tony, and everybody else affiliated with the Avengers. 

"Bucky, you better leave Arty alone," Steph tells him, waddling down the stairs at a furious pace to rescue her fucking robot, lifting it into her arms like it's an actual baby what the fuck. Nestled up against her tits, it purrs smugly. Yeah, Bucky bets it's purring smugly. 

"That thing is creepy," Bucky argues. "It's probably videotaping you in the shower."

"I'm sure Pepper would have disabled any of those capabilities before letting Tony send it to us," Stephanie tells him primly, and laying a brisk kiss on the robot's head, she says, "Come on, Arty. Let's let you finish mapping out the rooms in the house and get you away from the bad men."

That leaves Bucky alone with Clint to field maybe 1 million phone calls about the robot's distress call, including but not limited to Sam Wilson calling to say, "That is fucked up, Barnes. You do not shoot your baby's robot, Jesus fucking Christ."

At the end of that conversation, Clint looks at Bucky and says sagely, "She's going to leave you for him one day. No joke."

Bucky nods. It seems pretty likely at the moment.  


* * *

Stephanie doesn't leave him for Sam, but she does ask Sam to be their godfather.

Nobody gets out of that conversation with all their dignity intact.

* * *

It turns out babies actually take ten months, not nine, to bake, and as Stephanie's belly gets bigger and bigger time starts doing funny things.

Bucky wakes up in the morning and thinks that they're doomed, that they've only got _five months left_ and then they'll have a _child_ and that they live in a building owned by a guy who scammed it off of Russian mobsters and can't fix the hot water. This storm of worries follows him out the door to the bar, then out the bar to whatever the latest Avengers-level emergency is, and then to their mandatory post-op medical check. But by the time Bucky gets back home and finds Steph napping on their couch, the TV on mute in the background showing an episode of Wags to Riches — her hand low over the swell of her stomach — five months feels like forever, an eternity. Then he aches like a gut wound to meet their baby already, to see it not just in grainy black and white pictures or 3D models courtesy of Stark and Vision, then it feels like time stretches out like a limit to infinity, and their child is only ever asymptotically approaching. 

And then Bucky finds himself plunged into cold terror again. The idea of their kid — on its own — is terrifying, the hugeness and responsibility of it, that after everything he should be allowed to be anywhere near a kid, much less have one. Bucky can't have conversations with people about guilt; the magnitude of his past makes it an impossible comparison. Stephanie always tells him it wasn't him, and Bucky doesn't bother to remind her that it was still his hands — the same palm and fingers that she lets him press to her cheek and to her breasts, into the hot wet between her legs. Bucky's not scared Stephanie would run if she knew everything; she'd read about Bucky killing Howard in a file and more or less lied to Tony's face about it afterward. Stephanie doesn't blink.She's run into collapsing buildings and warzones after him, so fucking stubborn, and thank God, thank _God_ for it, but Jesus — _a kid_.

The idea of their kid triggers something that feels like an avalanche, a whiteout, and Bucky can't breathe through the ice of fear and the hot blaze of terrified happiness. He doesn't let himself entertain too many fantasies, doesn't imagine a little boy's hair or a little girl's face. Bucky knows he's going to wake up one day in the cryochamber and get put back in the chair. He lives in the present, soaks in the warmth of Stephanie's arms and carries the weight of her body, commits it all to desperate memory. 

He doesn't tell any of this to Stephanie, but he figures she must know in some way, because whenever he goes quiet too long she comes and takes his hand, presses it to the swelling curve of her belly. She tells him, "Hey — stay here, okay? Stay here with me," and he strokes a thumb over her skin and nods, mute with hurt, because he's trying — he's trying as hard as he can. 

* * *

Stephanie asks Stark to be the kid's other godfather. Somehow, that conversation goes even worse than the one with Wilson. It takes six hours, and by the end of it, Stark looks like he just came off a twelve-day bender. Stephanie's red eyed, as beautiful as she always is, and Bucky watches her press a tender, lingering kiss to Tony's cheek, to his temple — he watches the way Tony leans into her, shaking, and Bucky gets it, he can't blame the guy — and she whispers, "Thank you — _thank you,_ " and she means it for more than just this promise, she means it for all that Stark's mess of a heart can forgive.

* * *

Arty finishes scanning the apartment, the building, the fucking neighborhood, all of New York City. He's been programmed to follow Stephanie around like an indestructibly loyal dog, and Bucky can't get over their happening modern life: superheroics, robot pets, buns in the oven.

Their spring is a jarring mix of adult obligations, divvying up their time between Avengers missions and more domestic pursuits. They fight Doombots. They agree to move into Stark Tower temporarily as Stephanie tiptoes into the second trimester, and the news breaks like an H-bomb over the internet that Lady Liberty is pregnant. They participate in a series of United Nations talks on the daunting security challenges now faced in the world; Stephanie shows up for her speech in neon pink foam ladies walking shoes and a razor-sharp suit, because she's five months pregnant and she's going to wear whatever she wants. They buy an old baby's crib at goodwill, which sends both Stark _and_ Wilson into fits and no amount of Bucky explaining that it's not their baby unless both he and Stephanie eat it helps. They develop contingency plans with SHIELD backed by a phalanx of Tony's lawyers, because Bucky might try not to think about it too much but he and Stephanie are both products of the finest wartime engineering, and their kid will be the first supersoldier kid conceived the old fashioned way as far as anybody knows. They buy _another_ crib, just to make Stark and Wilson shut up.

They fuck — a lot.

Stephanie's hips are softer, her breasts heavier in his hands, and they both watch stretch marks slowly appear. Bucky marvels at all of it, at everything; this is the third Stephanie he's known, that he's been allowed to lay hands on, from that bird-boned girl he'd married to the knockout that found him in the war and now this Stephanie, all new again, with rounder cheeks and a drowsy golden-pink flush, sewing baby clothes on their couch yelling at every couple on _House Hunters_.

She tells him it's safe, they don't have to go so slow, but Bucky likes it languid and easy sometimes: taking her knitting or teacup out of her hands so he can bear her down into their sofa, kiss the corners of her mouth and the hollow of her throat, slide his hands up her shirt — over the rise of her stomach — and thumb at her nipples. 

" _Bucky_ ," she complains, shameless and hot for him in a way that makes Bucky delirious. 

He focuses on unbuttoning her shirt — his shirt, actually, that she's appropriated for her own — and kissing all the new skin it reveals: soft white sternum, the pink flush of the slope of her breast, the taut skin of her belly. 

Stephanie huffs. " _Bucky,_ come _on_ ," she tries again.

 

"I'm busy here, Steph," he mumbles back, sucking kisses across her tits until he can close his mouth over one of her coral pink nipples and run his teeth over the tender skin there. It makes her jump, whole body trembling, and he thinks about her breasts getting heavier still, milky, and groans into her skin, rocks his hips into her — denim rubbing against her soft cotton panties. If Stephanie wants to avoid getting waylaid from craft projects, she's got to start wearing pants around the house.

She wriggles under his hands, under his mouth, and sighing — long, lavish — she whispers, "I'm still all wet with you from this morning," curling her nails into his shoulders, through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

Bucky has all kinds of comebacks for that, profanity in a dozen languages that trips off the tongue, Steph just bites at his shoulder, reaches for the button on his jeans and closes a hand around his cock through the fly of his boxer briefs, giving him a friendly squeeze and a less-friendly scrape of her nail.

" _Fuck_ ," he gasps into her ear, and his elbow goes weak with it, so he sags over her tilting like a ship mid-capsize. The metal arm's the only thing keeping him up, and Stephanie complicates matters further by pressing their cheeks together, purring into his ear as she opens up the cradle of her hips, hitches a naked thigh high up on his hip. 

"I'm working on it but I could use some help," she sasses him, because she's a pain in his ass and has been for almost 100 years. 

"God damn unbelievable," Bucky says, to her, to himself, to the universe, and he kisses his hot annoyance into her mouth — she just laughs at him, he can tell from the way her shoulders are moving — and pulls her panties aside so he can press inside. 

Stephanie wasn't lying before, she's soaking, everything between her thighs slicked up or wet through, the fabric of her panties cool and heavy where they scrape up against the side of his dick on the stroke in. He loves that, that little extra bite of stimulation, and Stephanie fucking knows it, especially times like now, when she's volcanically hot and so easy he could fuck for hours, coasting on the lightheaded bliss of her, the greedy clasp of her body and Stephanie's arms looped over his shoulders, her fingers combing through his hair, the soft noise she makes every time he bottoms out: high and fragile and needy. 

Bucky keeps her thigh pinned with his metal fingers, but when he reaches for her clit she says, "No — no, just like this," and so he takes the opportunity to fist his other hand into the wild blond riot of her hair. She never bothers to tie it up at home, just lets it cascade down her long neck and down her back, the ends curling soft, and Bucky loves it, loves twining a lock around a finger or grabbing a fistful during sex. 

Steph's whole body seizes when he does — he can feel it earthquake through her, in the way she goes tighter around his dick — and she gasps, "oh, oh, oh," in ever higher tones. 

She goes off like a rocket with him grinding deep into her, slow and filthy and patient, the hot metal teeth of his zipper scraping her skin and her tits flushed, chest heaving. It feels like being immolated, cleansed with fire, when he comes, putting his teeth into her shoulder and gasping. 

They spend the rest of the night curled together on the floor because the fabric cleaner needs to soak into the couch upholstery, and Stephanie spends it admiring the set of purpling teeth marks Bucky left her.

"Hey," Bucky asks, halfway through an episode of _Fixer Upper,_ struck with a sudden sense of cold realization, "what are we naming this kid?" 

* * *

Pregnancy is strange. It's strange from the sidelines, watching all the ways Stephanie's body is changing; Bucky can't imagine how it must feel from the driver's seat. They have half-asleep conversations sometimes, because Stephanie wakes up with heartburn now in the middle of the night, and it helps her to get propped up against his chest until the pain fades. They talk about what they think their baby will be like, if it's a boy or a girl, compare old wives tales that have been volunteered by various members of the Avengers or SHIELD tactical. Stephanie sometimes goes on quiet rambles, filling in the blanks for Bucky on the years she was awake and he was — not there, not with her. It's how he learns about her empty apartment in Dupont Circle, her insane running path every morning in Washington D.C., that time she went on an abortive date with Sam Wilson. Bucky doesn't have leg to stand on when it comes to that shit but it doesn't help that it's Wilson, who he can tell Steph loves in that starry eyed way she loves people; it makes his heart burn, too. They talk about their childhood, their long ago past, and they talk about their future, hurtling toward them with breathless speed.

"You know, when we were 19, 20 years old, this all felt so inevitable and obvious," Stephanie tells him one night, the clock wallowing at 1 a.m. in the eerily noiseless containment unit of their floor in Stark Tower. She turns on her side, so she can press her forehead into the the curve where Bucky's neck meets his shoulder, and he presses his hand to her cheek, reflexive, and it takes him half a beat before he realizes it's his metal one; she doesn't let him pull it away, traps it with her own. 

He gives up after a while and sighs, says, "Yeah? Not anymore?" 

"It was just what you did back then: marry your sweetheart, have a couple of kids, hope for better for them," she goes on, mumbling it into his t-shirt. "Now? Everything's so complicated now. And — "

Bucky hears the hitch in her throat, the break in her sentence, and he scrubs his other hand down her back in lazy circles, dropping a kiss to the shell of her ear, the place where her hair meets her temple. 

" — and I buried a lot of those dreams long ago," she croaks. "I put them in the dirt with a box of your stuff. I thought it was over. I was done for." 

It's a fight against his instincts not to crush her more tightly to him, to keep his touch light and his voice light, to whisper reassuring noises to her. He doesn't remember the train anymore, or what happened to his arm, the first few years. His recall doesn't kick in until the second rounds of experimentation started, until Hydra had come into his cell to measure the ruined mess of his shoulder with too much interest. But Bucky's got his imagination, an internet connection, the entire Stark Industries archival department. He has everything he knows about Stephanie, how she loves and loses, and he knows that she was the walking wounded for less than a month after he fell before she piloted a fucking airplane into the frozen sea. 

"Hey, we're just getting started," he tells her. "We're both here now, all right?" 

She nods, but her eyes are squeezed shut, she's breathing too fast. Bucky can hear her heart racing and the heat off of her skin, so he closes his arms more tightly around her, until they're clutched close with their baby reassuringly safe between them. 

Even buried dreams can grow, Bucky guesses, stubborn like a weed reaching for the sun.

* * *

Toward the end of her pregnancy, Stephanie starts getting horribly tired. She'd skipped right over morning sickness, most of the early trimester fatigue, and every other purported potential side effect of gestation thanks probably to American exceptionalism in wartime and loose bioethics. But as the eighth month drips lazily into the ninth, Bucky starts finding like a lounging cat, asleep absolutely everywhere and anywhere: the living room couches or armchairs, head down on folded arms at the kitchen table, on her side on top of the covers in their bed.

One time he gets a call from Stark, telling him to come fetch his wife, because she'd gone down to his lab for something and fallen asleep under a work bench.

She's snoring a little by the time he gets down there. Stark is absolutely covered in engine oil and looks hunted. 

"Why was she even down here?" Bucky asks.

"We're friends, what, we can't be friends?" Stark says, reflexive and immediate. 

Bucky's all too aware of Steph's weird, massive soft spot for Starks. She'd liked Howard too much and she likes Tony too much, finds their manic awfulness charming. With Tony it's worse: in lived years, he's older than her, in experiences, Stephanie loves him like a much younger brother, is endlessly, tenderly doting. It's the same misfiring part of her brain that makes Stephanie think Clint's cute. 

"Right, and what friendly discussions were you guys having," Bucky says, flatly and without any effort at making it a question. 

Stark suddenly becomes _fascinated_ with a circuit board. "Just you know — girl stuff, gossip, cute boys in homeroom, if I should bleach my hair for prom."

Bucky doesn't even want to know. "I don't even want to know," he says, drags Stephanie out from under the work bench to carry her back toward the elevators.

"You're not even a little worried about us canoodling?" Stark yells at him as the lift doors close. "I'm an attractive man — she laughs at my jokes!" 

Dr. Ruiz says Steph's sudden narcolepsy is normal and expected in the weeks leading up to birth. Her impromptu naps during the day are helping to compensate for her increasingly restless nights, sleep interrupted by cramps, another trip to the bathroom, her back hurting, reflux, or hell, a breeze going the wrong direction. Bucky sleeps like shit anyway, so he just takes it in stride, helps her up to the bathroom, gets her water, turns on the fan.

"Then you're doing everything right, Mr. Barnes," Dr. Ruiz says, grinning. "Just treat this as training for once the baby's on the outside." 

Bucky scrubs his hands over his face. "Jesus."

Dr. Ruiz, being the kind of OB-GYN who keeps _Guns & Ammo_ in the waiting room, just smirks and asks, "You guys pick a name yet?"

"Stark added the kid to a pre-school waiting list as 'Superfetus,'" he says bleakly.

"You know what's a good name?" Dr. Ruiz says, grinning.

"Jesus, not you, too," Bucky moans.

In the next room, there's a young SHIELD nurse with a pixie cut fairly expiring under the glow of Stephanie's attention. It's a sad condition Bucky's seen in the wild a lot: there's a lot of dropping stuff and mumbling. Stephanie's understanding of her effect on people is purely abstract.

Dr. Ruiz points at her own name tag. "Veronica. _Great_ name."

Bucky can just hear Stephanie saying, "Your tattoo is so beautiful! Did you create the design yourself?" and the whole of the nurses's reply is something just vowel noises. Bucky doesn't blame her, because Stephanie's got her arm and is stroking her fingertips along the tattoo in admiration. 

"I'll add it to the list of possibles," Bucky allows, and goes to collect his wife before the poor nurse asphyxiates herself. 

In the subway, when Bucky's leaning over her and Steph's perched on the edge of a blue plastic seat all bright-eyed and earnest, she says to him, "Bucky, you know what? That nice nurse had a great name," and Bucky nearly pees himself laughing.

* * *

Stephanie goes into labor the same day Stephen Strange calls the Avengers to help clean up after an inter-dimensional spill leaves about 600 harmless but extremely confused racoonlike creatures wandering around the west side. It's garbage day, so of course the inter-dimensional raccoons, like Earth raccoons, discover the ecstatic bliss of trash. When the venerable _New York Post_ posts their next-day front page to Twitter at 3 p.m. it's a giant picture of the Hustler on 12th Avenue and their heap of garbage bags overrun with otherworldly raccoon animals under a massive headline reading NEW YORK SHITTY, which feels only fair. Bucky is literally double fisting raccoons, another one clinging to his boot, when he gets the call.

"Jesus fucking — _what?_ " he yells into the comm.

"Um," comes the reedy voice of _Peter fucking Parker_. "So, Mr. Winter Soldier, um, I was at the Tower, getting some stuff, and Mrs. Soldier let me up, and um — "

Bucky scruffs the little bastard gnawing at his pants, and now he's got fucking three of them in his hands. Unbelievable. "I'm fighting raccoons here, kid. Get to the point."

"Well. Mrs. Soldier's water broke, and she's on her way to SHIELD medical, and — "

Bucky doesn't hear the rest of it. He throw three raccoons at Sam Wilson, who screams like a toddler, hijacks a green cab, and books it.

SHIELD medical is five minutes door to door from the Tower. Because Bucky has an estranged relationship with traffic laws, and Stark flies over him broadcasting, "MAKE WAY, LADY LIBERTY JUST WENT INTO LABOR, MAKE WAY," he makes it from 12th Avenue to Midtown in less than 10 minutes through a combination of aggressive lane changes, driving on the sidewalk, and — when going through Times Square — taking a motorcycle a delivery guy offers him, saying, "Congrats! Just bring it back to King of Falafel later!" 

They'd had a discussion with Dr. Ruiz a few months ago, about Stephanie's particular healing factor and pain management. A c-section would be problematic, because her body would try to heal any surgical cuts, and it would be hard to keep re-opening the wound. There was also the issue of anesthetics, which work on Steph but only in quantities large enough to kill land mammals, and definitely unsafe for a fetus.

"That's fine," Steph had said, with the same cold-eyed clarity she'd worn during wartime. "I should be able to have this child the old fashioned way, right?" 

Dr. Ruiz had said, "Yes, but after the stress testing results Mr. Stark shared with us — "

" _What?_ " Bucky had cut in.

" — it looks unlikely we have any materials appropriate for an epidural needle, even the vibranium wasn't a particularly stable metal for delivery," she'd concluded, apologetic.

"Can't be worse than getting shot," Stephanie had said, then.

When Bucky gets into her private hospital room, Stephanie's in a hospital gown and the giant fluffy robe Wilson bought her, walking in tight figure eights. His knees go weak with relief, and he doesn't even care that Stark clangs in after him, still in his Iron Man suit, babbling, "What's happening? How far are you dilated?"

"Four centimeters," Stephanie tells him, and adds kindly, "Go away."

Bucky closes the door on him, not in time to shut out Tony's yell of, " _Don't start pushing until you reach nine!_ " 

Pulling off his raccoon gloves, Bucky asks, "How are you feeling?" 

"Okay, I'm okay," Stephanie says, and Bucky finally gets his kiss: brief, sweet, a bit scared. "How about you? You okay?"

Bucky grins into her mouth. "I threw a bunch of raccoons at Wilson."

She's midway through giving him grief about it when her next contraction hits, and she doubles over, gasping through it, and leaves one of the metal legs of a visitor's chair mangled. They move her to the bed, and Bucky gives her his metal hand.

"Coward," she croaks at him. 

"I need the other one for fighting raccoons," he says, and uses it instead to brush the hair away from her sweaty forehead. "How's the pain?" 

She smiles at him, pale but real. "Still better than getting shot."

The first four hours of labor are pretty boring, all things even. She walks around the room, she and Bucky fight about names for a while, all the other Avengers finish corralling raccoons and make their way up to the hospital room one by one bearing presents for Steph and the eventual baby, and a bunch of pictures of Bucky fighting raccoons he didn't realize they were taking. What a bunch of assholes. Intermittently, she goes a bit white and silent from a passing contraction, and over the course of hours she dilates from 4 centimeters to 5 to 6. 

By then walking's not helping anymore, and Bucky makes everybody leave because Steph's starting to go mute with hurt, the way she used to when she was real sick. He knows this is normal, that it's called laboring for a reason, but looking at her white and flushed like she's feverish, boneless on a hospital bed is a sickening reminder of too many other nights. 

She gets nauseated. She has to shit. She doesn't want to drink any water because she thinks it'll make her throw up again, even though Dr. Ruiz says she's got to stay hydrated. She goes from 6 centimeters to 7, agonizingly slow, during the seventh hour of labor, and at the end of one long and breathless contraction all Steph can do is lie there and cry, mouthing ice chips and pressing a hand over her eyes.

"It's taking too long," Bucky tells Dr. Ruiz, during a break where Wilson's sitting with Stephanie, trying to distract her with episodes of Ancient Aliens.

"It's going a little more slowly than average," Dr. Ruiz admits. "We think it might be the serum, fighting the process." 

Dr. Erskine's legacy is always going to be Stephanie's blessing and curse, and Bucky watches her sob through another two hours before Dr. Ruiz says it's okay to start pushing. 

Bucky's seen and inflicted all kinds of suffering — fast and slow deaths, but this is nothing like this. This feels transformative, transcending. Stephanie's grip destroys the hospital bed rails, and she goes from screaming to guttural hurt noises Bucky's never heard her make before. She cries and she swears and she begs and Bucky cries with her; he feels like he can feel her panic through their clutched-together fingers, through when he presses his forehead to hers, through the air, crackling in the room from the hoarse scrape of her voice, over Dr. Ruiz murmuring encouragements. 

The baby makes her appearance at hour thirteen. 

She's wrinkled and red and covered in blood and caul and fucking hideous, and Bucky is flattened, feels like he's been cored, all the air sucked out of his lungs. Stephanie is crying and Bucky is crying and when they cut the cord and lay her in Stephanie's arms, the bottom drops out.

Bucky got lectured until his ears turned inside out about skin to skin touch, and so he presses his hand to their daughter's little cheek, watches her curled tight against Stephanie's chest, the hospital gown pulled away. Her dark hair is pasted in whorls to her skull, and she has ten fingers and ten toes, and Bucky marvels at the newness of her, the suddenness of her, the wrinkles of skin, and the mottled pale and pink of her body. He kisses her head, the miniature shell of her ear, her shoulder, an elbow — everywhere he can reach. He kisses Stephanie blindly on the crown of her beautiful hair, matted down with sweat, and he kisses her face and tastes the bitter salt of tears and he doesn't know if they're her's or his. It doesn't matter. He kisses their baby again. 

Stephanie passes the afterbirth — Dr. Ruiz pushes on her belly, asks for one big push — but she doesn't seem to notice it. She's too busy saying, "Look, Buck, she has your nose," and, "Oh, no, she has my chin." 

They send the bravest or the most battle-hardened nurse to take the baby away from them. 

"Five minutes, tops," she says, no-nonsense.

"What, no," Bucky says, even as Stephanie's handing their daughter over. 

His face must be telling. "Go hover over her shoulder if you're going to be like this," she tells him, unrepentant, which sounds like a great plan until he tries and gets more or less sent away like a misbehaving dog.

It takes ages, eons, at least _six minutes_ before their baby's returned, and it's the first breath after swimming up from the bottom of the sea to have her back. She's in a swaddling cloth, now, and Bucky holds her too carefully because Steph's arms give out, sits on a rolling stool and holds their daughter close between them. There's a half dozen people in and out of the room, taking away linens and giving stitches, but Bucky doesn't really remember any of it. He's memorized the way Stephanie's fingertips look, touching their daughter's face, instead. He let's it sear into his brain, hopes it overwrites some of his other memories, and he's leaning over to press a kiss to Stephanie's shoulder when she whispers: 

"Hey, I have an idea for a name."

* * *

They end up naming the daughter after the tattooed nurse.

Emma has Stephanie's blue eyes and Bucky's dark curls. She inherits Bucky's personality, which means she's head over heels for her momma, which Bucky figures is all right. She's small, came out just 5 pounds 3 oz at birth, slightly below normal range, and as she grows it gets obvious that the serum and whatever was done to Bucky weren't heritable, that their little girl might grow up more like Stephanie Rogers did in the 1930s than the woman who woke up in 2011. 

But the future's full of good things: antibiotics, inhalers, vitamins. Bucky makes a full and comprehensive list of Stephanie's health history and provides it to their pediatricians; Arty's programming is updated accordingly. 

Stark and Wilson compete for title of worst childcare provider on a routine basis. Stark thinks tricking out her stroller with engine functionality is an appropriate way to spend an afternoon; Wilson thinks letting her play with Red Wing is appropriate use of Avengers property. One time Bucky sees Natasha give Emma one finger to latch onto, sit cross-legged on the floor and let Emma gum on her hand for an hour. Clint's as good with kids as he is with dogs, which is to say accidentally a natural. Bruce smiles at her from a distance, refuses to pick her up — which, all right, maybe that's fair.

But Emma and Thor are the ones who have a little mutual admiration society. She loves his loud voice, his long hair, his giant fucking hammer. She loves his God damn cape and his dumb fucking hat with wings on it. She listens, rapt and completely not understanding a damn word, while Thor regales her with tales of battlefield glory slaying bilgesnipe. Thor tries _twice_ to take her to Asgard.

"Get your own baby," Bucky tells him, and repossesses his daughter. 

"Maybe some other time, Young Emma!" Thor calls after them, and Emma just giggles and waves back, her hand absolutely covered in — jam? Where'd she get jam?

Bucky washes her hands, he changes her dress. He knows how lucky he is, how undeserving, so he works hard every day to be good, to be worth something. Bucky doesn't believe in God, but in case there's karma, he's on his best behavior. He runs his bar; he subs in for Lady Liberty; he helps raise their daughter; he loves his wife. 

When Emma starts getting aggressively mobile, he buys her a backpack leash.

"And so we come full circle," Stephanie says, when he and Emma meet her outside of her NYU art class, where she is surrounded by hopefuls of both genders in women's skinny jeans in the brisk autumn wind. Emma's wearing a little hat with fox ears on it, and Bucky keeps dying every time he catches a glimpse of her, it's so fucking cute. 

"It's a busy city and she's a runner," he protests. "She gets that from you."

"You're right, this one's defective," Stephanie laughs, and sweeps Emma up into her arms, dotting kisses all over her face, going in for a squeeze, and as she's setting her down again, Steph slants Bucky that Look — under the lashes, with intent. "What do you say we try again?"

* * *

They make Clint babysit. As soon as Bucky hands Emma over to Clint's arms, she shrieks until she's let down and makes a beeline for Lucky. 

"Uh, have a nice date," Clint says. 

Bucky claps him on the shoulder. "Barton, if you hear a murder this time, don't come running."

**Author's Note:**

> Waldorph: out of everything you've ever written   
> Waldorph: i think " And then there's Steph, whose pussy is very important to him for a variety of reasons."   
> Waldorph: is your masterwork  
> Pru: thank you


End file.
